Most frequently when a flat food item is being cooked by direct contact with a hot surface, the heat is applied from underneath to the bottom surface of the food item. Then the food item is flipped over, inverted, turned, rolled or otherwise relatively moved with regard to the hot surface, in order to remove a relatively cooked portion of the item from such proximity to the heat, and simultaneously to bring a relatively uncooked portion of the item into closer proximity with the heat and so, by turns, eventually to sufficiently evenly and completely cook the food item all over. An example of this practice is the baking of a griddle cake on a hot griddle. Another example is the frying or broiling of a hamburger on a griddle.
Although not done so frequently, it is also a common practice to cook at least certain food products by applying heat simultaneously to opposite surfaces. An example of this practice is the baking of a waffle in a waffle iron.
It is known that certain food products, when being cooked by direct contact of one heated surface with one side of the product behave in a seemingly uncooperative manner, in that they warp from an originally planar shape that ca be relatively easily uniformly heated across all of its one side, into a domed or irregularly warped shape that is subject to becoming overcooked on its downwardly projecting rims, ridges and the like, while remaining undercooked on its arched surface portions. An example is the cooking of a frozen hamburger patty on a restaurant grill. Long ago some one invented a very useful instrument for use on restaurant grills. One name by which it is known is a bun press. In general, it looks like a mason's sidewalk surface finishing tool and like an old-fashioned sadiron--basically a soleplate with a handle. As a food product which would warp, or arch away from the grill, or become rippled or otherwise lose good contact of its lower side with the grill is being cooked, the grill attendant can periodically, occasionally, or even continually press down on the food product with the sole plate of the bun press, thereby to maintain good contact of the bottom side of the food product with the heated surface.
When a cook is busy at a grill and is using such a bun press more or less intermittantly, there is a tendency for him or her to `park` the bun press beside, or even on the hot griddle surface.
At some point in the past, some enterprising individual figured out that a net benefit could be gained by `parking` a bun press directly on the hot surface of the grill, so long as its handle was protected against getting too hot. That benefit lies in the capacity of the sole plate of the bun press not only to be useful in pushing the bottom side of the food product down into intimate contact with the hot grill surface, but also to be useful in losing some of its acquired heat to the topside of the food product, and thereby causing the food product to become sufficiently cooked in less time.
A grill is an expensive capital cost for a restaurant, and it has a significant operating cost. Any trick-of-the-trade or other modification to the state-of-the-art way of cooking a certain food on a grill that will result in the restaurant being able to cook more of that food product per unit time on the same grill surface area therefore is considered to be almost a godsend, because of its potential effect on costs.
Prior efforts have been made to combine some of the above-related concepts into topside cooker devices for assisting in the cooking of hamburgers and other products on restaurant grills. However, as for the prior efforts with which the present inventor is familiar, success remains a limited quality, in large part because the prior inventors used waffle irons and the like as too strong a role model. Accordingly, the prior art topside cookers are hinged to a grill at the rear in much the same way that an upper platen of an electric waffle baker is hinged at its rear to the waffle baker's lower platen. As a result of this constructional feature often it is difficult to get the prior art topside cooker far-enough out of the way when the grill operator is not using it, and, in any event, it is practically prohibitively costly to retrofit such a prior art topside cooker to even the brand of grill it was desrgned to go with, to say nothing of the cost of retrofitting other brands of grills, a task which can vary from the inconvenient to the impractical to the impossible.
The present invention was devised to provide an improved topside cooker which is easily provided for use on any brand of grill, which can be gotten out of the way when not in use, which is easily adjusted for topside cooking of foods of varying thickness, and which is durable and easily cleaned.